The modern era of communications has brought about an enormous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy for information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. For example, the evolved universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) is currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards. A benefit of modern wireless technologies optimized for data transmission is the fast adaptation of the transmission to radio conditions, that normally varies extensively when a user is moving. A fundamental part of the fast adaptation is having a very fast protocol for retransmissions or adding coding redundancy by additional transmissions. This also means that the latency may vary significantly due the a priori unknown amount of transmissions that is needed in order to transfer a certain chunk of data. Furthermore, different to wireline communication and less dynamic wireless communication the data rate is expected to vary extensively when the user moves, which further adds uncertainty to the time needed for the actual transmission of a chunk of data, during which time the data is still buffered in the transmitter and has not been fully received in the receiver.
One advantage of E-UTRAN which continues to be shared with other preceding telecommunication standards is the fact that users are enabled to access a network employing such standards while remaining mobile. Thus, for example, users having mobile terminals equipped to communicate in accordance with such standards may travel vast distances while maintaining communication with the network. By providing access to users while enabling user mobility, services are available to users while the users remain mobile. However, the mobility of users requires the network to provide continuity of service to the mobile users by enabling a user's mobile terminal to be handed over between different serving stations within corresponding different cells or service areas. To verify and test radio network deployment and operation, drive tests have been conducted in the past. Drive testing typically involved the use of specific measurement tools that could be driven or carried through an area to collect data for network operation verification. Thus, manual testing and verification of radio network operation has been common.
For existing and especially for newer networks (e.g. LTE and future networks), it may be desirable to reduce the need for drive testing or walk testing to reduce manual testing of networks and therefore reduce operational costs. Accordingly, studies regarding support for minimization of drive tests (MDT) are currently popular which aim to utilize commercial terminals for reporting of relevant measurement results in order to avoid separate manual testing with special test equipment and involvement of operator personnel.
Although the current invention is not limited to the context of MDT, MDT is deemed to be the closest current art. MDT features enable UEs to perform measurements of network performance such as latency measurements and throughput measurements. Latency is the delay between a stimulus and a response. A latency measurement in the context of communications is the time expended by propagation through a communication medium and communication hardware, as well as the execution time of the required software. Latency measurements provide an indication as to the time required for data to arrive at the desired destination. A throughput measurement in the context of communications is a measure of a successfully communicated data volume over specific amount of time. Both latency and throughput measurements require an assumption as to when the data to be measured is stored into a transmit buffer before transmission of the data occurs, i.e. when that data becomes available for transmission to the protocol stack that handles the data transmission. Current MDT features or other measurement features based on the current 3GPP protocol stack fail to accurately provide an indication as to when the data team measured is stored into a transmit buffer before transmission of the data occurs.
It is the objective of the current invention to address the shortcomings in current art. It is desirable to provide a solution that fulfills the new system requirements related to performing various network performance measurements with maximum simplicity and minimum impact to the current system.